Chuck Klosterman's ninth book, But What If We're Wrong?,considers the possibility that contemporary people might be incorrect about some of our most deeply held, fundamentally unquestioned opinions and beliefs. SubtitledThinking About the Present As If It Were the Past,the book explores how (and why) societies in 100 or 300 or 1,000 years might hold radically altered memories of the literature, entertainment, science, and politics of the early 21st century, contradicting the way those concepts are casually considered in the present. This excerpt is the first of a two-part chapter on the tenuous future of American football.

Prop Stylist: Robin Finlay. Makeup: Tara Cooper

On a frigid evening in February 2010, I was asked to appear at a reading series held in a Brooklyn art gallery. I accepted the invitation. I did not, however, pay much attention to the details of the invite and erroneously assumed this art gallery was located in Manhattan, which meant I was 25 minutes late for the opening of an event where I was the opening act. The evening's headliner was writer Malcolm Gladwell, whom I'd met in person maybe five or six times before (and on two of those occasions, we'd discussed the Buffalo Bills†). Since I was still crossing the East River in a taxi at the 7 P.M. start time, the order of the speakers was flopped. Gladwell graciously spoke first. When I finally arrived, he was almost finished with his piece, a reported essay from The New Yorker about why NFL teams are habitually terrible at drafting quarterbacks. Upon finishing the reading, he took a handful of questions from the audience, almost all of which were about football. The last question was about the future of the sport. Gladwell's response, at least at the time, seemed preposterous. “In 25 years,” he said, “no one in America will play football and no one in America will eat red meat.” He thanked the crowd and exited the stage.

†Gladwell went to college in Toronto. People from Toronto view the Bills as their local franchise.

After a brief intermission, it was my turn to perform. Sensing a mild degree of bewilderment from the audience, I tried to break the ice by making a joke about Gladwell's closing prediction. “There is no way people will not be playing football or eating meat in 25 years,” I said. “In fact, there is a much higher likelihood that in 25 years, I will literally eat the flesh of all the various football players who've died during whatever game I happened to watch that day.” Forty people laughed. I then favorably compared the state of Alabama to the island of Samoa. Four people laughed. But here's the pivotal takeaway from that particular night: At the time, my absurdist jokes felt more reasonable than Gladwell's analysis. Predicting that the most popular game in the country would no longer exist in less than two generations made it seem like he didn't really know what he was talking about. But now, of course, everyone talks like Gladwell. In the span of five years, that sentiment has become the conventional intellectual take on the future of football. It is no longer a strange thing to anticipate. Gladwell has grown even more confident: “This is a sport that is living in the past, that has no connection to the realities of the game right now and no connection to the rest of society,” I heard him say on a TV show called Studio 1.0. “[The NFL] is completely disconnected to the consequences of the sport that they are engaged in.… They are off on this 19th-century trajectory which is fundamentally out of touch with the rest of us.” The show's host asked if he still believed football was destined to die. “I don't see how it doesn't. It will start to shrivel at the high school and college level, and then the pro game will wither on the vine.”

It's disorienting how rapidly this perception has normalized, particularly considering a central contradiction no one seems to deny—football is not only the most popular sport in the country but a sport that is becoming more popular, assuming TV ratings can be trusted as a yardstick. It's among the few remnants of the pre-Internet monoculture; it could be convincingly argued that football is more popular in America than every other sport combined. Over 110 million people watched the most recent Super Bowl, but that stat is a predictable outlier—what's more stunning is the 25 million people who regularly watch the NFL draft. Every spring, millions of people spend three days scrutinizing a middle-aged man in a gray suit walking up to a podium to announce the names of people who have not yet signed a contract. Football is so popular that people (myself included) have private conversations about how many people would have to die on the field before we'd seriously consider giving it up. Which is the kind of conversation that pushes everyone else toward one of two conclusions:

1. Football is doomed. This is the Gladwellian outlook, and it generally goes something like this: The number of on-field concussions continues to increase, as does the medical evidence of how dangerous football truly is. More and more pro players proactively quit (San Francisco linebacker Chris Borland being the first high-profile example). Retired players start to show signs of mental deficiency at a higher and higher frequency. Perhaps a prominent wide receiver is killed on national television, and his death dominates the national conversation for three months. The issue becomes political, and the president gets involved (much like Teddy Roosevelt did in 1905, the year 19 college players were killed on football fields). Virtually all parents stop their children from playing youth football, and schools can't afford the insurance liability required for a collision sport of this magnitude. The high school game rapidly disappears, leading to a collapse of the college game. With its feeder system eliminated, the NFL morphs into a sloppy enterprise that's still highly dangerous and prohibitively expensive. Public interest evaporates and a $50 billion bubble spontaneously bursts. Like 32 brachiosaurs, NFL teams are too massive to evolve. In less than a generation, the game vanishes. Its market share is split between soccer and basketball.

Prop Stylist: Robin Finlay. Makeup: Tara Cooper

2. Football will survive, but not in its current form. The less incendiary take on football's future suggests that it will continue, but in a different shape. It becomes a regional sport, primarily confined to places where football is ingrained in the day-to-day culture (Florida, Texas, etc.). Its fan base resembles that of contemporary boxing—rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves. The NFL persists through sheer social pervasiveness—a system that's too big to fail and too economically essential to too many micro-economies. The game itself is altered for safety. “As a natural optimist who loves football, I can only really give one answer to this question, and the answer is yes. I believe that football can and will still have a significant place in American culture in a hundred years,” says Michael MacCambridge, author of the comprehensive NFL history America's Game. “That said, I suspect it will be a less violent game than it has been in the past. And this would be in line with the changes throughout American spectator sports—and society at large—over the previous century. In the 19th century, in baseball, you could throw a runner out on his way to first merely by pegging him in the back with the ball while he was hurrying down the first-base line. That age of bare-knuckles boxing and cockfighting and football as organized mayhem eventually changed to reflect the sensibilities of the modern era. So football will continue to change over the next century, and so will protective football equipment.”

Though they empty into dissimilar cul-de-sacs, these two roads share one central quality: a faith in reason. Both the Gladwell model and the MacCambridge model are built on the thesis that logic will dictate the future of sport. Gladwell believes consumers are too reasonable to continue supporting a game that kills people; MacCambridge believes the people who drive football are too reasonable to allow the game to continue killing its participants. Both perspectives place trust in the motives and intelligence of the populace.

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But I am less willing to do that.

When does something truly become popular? And I don't mean “popular” in the sense that it succeeds; I mean “popular” in the sense that the specific thing's incontrovertible popularity is the most important thing about it. I mean “popular” in the way Pet Rocks were popular in 1975, or the way E.T. was popular in 1982, or the way Oprah Winfrey was popular for most of the '90s.

The answer to this question is both obvious and depressing: Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don't particularly care. You don't create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year. And this goal is what the NFL has been working toward since the late 1970s. The hard-core football audience is huge, but not huge enough—the NFL also wants to lasso those who can't name any player whose wife doesn't get mentioned in Us Weekly. They want people who watch three games a season to join their office fantasy league. They want informal sports fans to feel like they must follow pro football, lest they be seen as people who don't like sports at all. You can't perpetuate a $7 billion industry without aggressively motivating the vaguely unmotivated. Yet this level of social saturation is precisely what places football on the precipice. There are many athletic activities more dangerous than football—bull riding, BASE jumping, auto racing. It has been alleged that 71 of the first 75 people who pioneered the wingsuit died during the testing process. Every year, multiple people perish climbing Mount Everest (in April 2014, sixteen Sherpas were killed on the same day). But the difference with football is the ethical compliance, particularly for casual spectators with little emotional investment. The audience for the Brickyard 400 is a marginalized audience. (They all know what happens when cars crash into walls at 140 mph.) The audience for Cheyenne Frontier Days is a marginalized audience. (They all know what happens when a 2,200-pound bull lands on a cowboy's neck.) These are fully invested fans who aren't alarmed or confused by the inherent dangers of their niche obsession. They know what they're getting into. No UFC fan is shocked by the sight of a man knocked unconscious. Football, however, appeals to a swath of humanity many magnitudes larger. It attracts people who haven't necessarily considered the ramifications of what they're witnessing—people who think they're relaxing at home on a Sunday afternoon, nonchalantly watching the same low-stakes distraction as everyone else. So when this type of person is suddenly confronted with the realization that what he is watching might be killing the people who participate—or if he was to actually see a player killed on the field, which seems increasingly inevitable—he is overcome with guilt and discomfort (and bewilderment over how he's supposed to feel about economically supporting a game that mildly terrifies him). The sheer scale of football's popularity likewise creates an opportunity for media grandstanding—self-righteous pundits denounce football the same way histrionic gatekeepers denounced booze in 1919 and Dungeons & Dragons in 1985. Over time, this fusion of public discomfort and media theatrics generates a political meaning. It now “means something” to support football. Those who self-identify as enlightened believe it means something tragic. And in ten years, that sentiment might reflect most of the U.S. population.

It will never represent all of the population, even if it becomes the dominant way to think and feel. And that will make it unkillable. When any idea becomes symbolically dominant, those who dislike the idea will artificially inflate the necessity of whatever it opposes. (Second Amendment purists do this all the time.) This is why I can imagine a world where football continues to thrive—not in spite of its violence, but because of it. And not in some latent, unspoken context—openly, and without apology.

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In the present moment, football operates as two parallel silos, both of which are shooting skyward and gaining momentum. One silo reflects the overall popularity of the sport, which increases every year. The other silo houses the belief that the game is morally reprehensible, a sentiment that swells every day. Somehow, these two silos never collide. But let's assume such a collision eventually happens, and the silo of popularity collapses on impact. It stops rocketing upward and is obliterated into a pile of bricks. That brick pile will be titanic, and it won't disappear. Neither will the people who built that silo, or those who lived inside it, or those who grew up worshipping its architecture. So they will use those bricks as weapons. They will throw them at the other silo. And since the game will no longer appeal to the casual fan, certain innate problems will turn into strengths.

The contemporary stance on football’s risk feels unilateral, because
nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet
this sentiment quietly exists.

A few months after being hired as head football coach at the University of Michigan, Jim Harbaugh was profiled on the HBO magazine show Real Sports. It was a wildly entertaining segment, heavily slanted toward the intellection that Harbaugh is a lunatic. One of the last things Harbaugh said in the interview was this: “I love football. Love it. Love it. I think it's the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men, in males.” Immediately following the segment, the reporter (Andrea Kremer) sat down with Real Sports host Bryant Gumbel to anecdotally unpack the story we'd all just watched. Gumbel expressed shock over Harbaugh's final sentiment. To anyone working in the media (or even to anyone who cares about the media), Harbaugh's position seemed sexist and ultra-reactionary, so much so that Rush Limbaugh felt the need to support it on his radio show.

This is what happens when any populist, uncomfortable thought is expressed on television.

††What she actually said was: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.”

There's an embedded assumption within all arguments regarding the doomed nature of football. The assumption is that the game is even more violent and damaging than it superficially appears, and that as more people realize this (and/or refuse to deny the medical evidence verifying that damage), the game's fan support will disappear. The mistake made by those advocating this position is their certitude that this perspective is self-evident. It's not. These advocates remind me of an apocryphal quote attributed to film critic Pauline Kael after the 1972 presidential election: “How could Nixon have won? I don't know one person who voted for him.” Now, Kael never actually said this.†† But that erroneous quote survives as the best shorthand example for why smart people tend to be wrong as often as their not-so-smart peers—they work from the flawed premise that their worldview is standard. The contemporary stance on football's risk feels unilateral, because nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet this sentiment quietly exists. And what those who believe it say instead is, “I love football. It's the last bastion of hope for toughness in America.” It's not difficult to imagine a future where the semantic distance between those statements is nonexistent. And if that happens, football will change from a popular leisure pastime to an unpopular political necessity.

When discussing football's future, the gut reaction is to try to reconcile its current condition with whatever we imagine the future will be like. At present, football is a problematic monolith, and it seems unlikely that such monolithic status can be sustained over time. But you don't need to remain monolithic if your core constituency cares more deeply than those who want the monolith destroyed. Football could lose 75 percent of its audience and matter just as much as it does now, assuming the people who stick with the game view it as a sanctuary from a modern world they distrust. Over time, it could really, really “mean something” to love football, in a context that isn't related to sports at all. It could be a signifier for an idea that can't be otherwise expressed—the belief that removing physicality from the public sphere does not remove it from reality, and that attempts to do so weaken the republic. Football could become a dead game to the casual sports fan without losing a fraction of its cultural influence. It could become the only way for a certain kind of person to safely access the kind of controlled violence he sees as a critical part of life.

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“But look what happened to boxing,” people will say (and these people sometimes include me). “Boxing was the biggest sport in America during the 1920s, and now it exists on the fringes of society. It was just too brutal.” Yet when Floyd Mayweather fought Manny Pacquiao in May 2015, the fight grossed $400 million, and the main complaint from spectators was that the fight was not brutal enough. Because it operates on a much smaller scale, boxing is—inside its own crooked version of reality—flourishing. It doesn't seem like it, because the average person doesn't care. But boxing doesn't need average people. It's not really a sport anymore. It's a mildly perverse masculine novelty, and that's enough to keep it relevant. It must also be noted that boxing's wounds were mostly self-inflicted. Its internal corruption was more damaging than its veneration of violence, and much of its fan base left of their own accord.

Conversely, football is experiencing a different type of crisis—there is a sense that the game is being taken from fans, and mostly by snooty strangers who never liked the sport in the first place. It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine—something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game's violence would save it, and it would never go away.

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